By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

This collection of papers, which resulted from the conference 'New Reflectionson Grammaticalization 4', held at the Katholike Universiteit Leuven in 2008, isintended to bridge gaps in the linguistic discourse on the topics of gradience,gradualness, and grammaticalization. It explores these topics from both formaland functional viewpoints, and aims to encompass both synchronic and diachronicdata in doing so. Because the articles in the book cover such a wide range ofresearch concentrations and theoretical viewpoints, the editors have identifiedthree primary questions that all the papers seek to answer:

1. ''How are we to understand the intersection between synchronic gradience andgrammaticalization?'' (2)

With respect to this question, the authors consider variation to be both theresult of and reason for linguistic change. There are various ways to approachthis; in terms of generative theory, variation is taken as a function ofcompeting grammars and a matter of performance, and is therefore not central toUG. In other theoretical frameworks, variation may be incorporated into thelinguistic model.

In his work on the subject of gradience, Aarts (2004, 2007) explores linguisticcategories in terms of prototype theory. In this approach, categories maydisplay subsective, or intra-categorial gradience, with members being more orless prototypical of the given category. They may also display intersectivegradience, with convergence occurring across categories. He examines thisprimarily using data from English with a focus on parts-of-speech categories. He concludes that these are different phenomena, and that although subsectivegradience is common, he does not believe that intersective gradience occurs, andargues against unnecessary fuzziness in grammar. He states that ''the intuitionbehind [his] proposals is that a particular formative may possess properties ofone or two categories to different degrees, resulting in gradience, but that thecategories in question can nevertheless be clearly delimited'' (242). However,many authors, including several of those in this volume, such as Bisang, DeSmet, Denison, Hilpert, Rosenbach, and Schøsler, argue against this distinctionand against a lack of intersective gradience, especially with respect tosemantics and in cases where languages have little morphology.

3. ''What does the intersection between grammaticalization and synchronicgradience tell us about the hypothesis of structural gradience, and aboutwhether work on grammaticalization needs reanalysis, analogy/extension, or someother mechanism?'' (2)

Because of differing approaches across theoretical frameworks, varyingdefinitions of the terms in this question are necessary. The editors specifythat 'gradualness' refers to diachronic processes, while 'gradience' isrestricted to synchronic processes. The definition of 'grammaticalization' isleft to the discretion of the individual authors, although in all cases it istreated as a process of extension. This question is based on the debate overwhether reanalysis or analogy is the dominant mechanism for linguistic change.

Although the papers included in this volume approach these questions from avariety of theoretical standpoints, there is a general consensus regarding theessential role of micro-changes in creating diachronic gradualness, as well assynchronic gradience. Furthermore, the importance of semantics and pragmatics,along with syntax and morphology, is emphasized throughout the volume; becauseof this, corpora are a common source of data.

In the first article, ''Gradience, gradualness, and grammaticalization: How dothey intersect?'', Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale expand upontheir introduction and provide an in-depth discussion of the theoretical issuesthat are the focus of this volume. They revisit the three questions that arelaid out in the introduction and give a summary of previous research on thesetopics, comparing formalist and functionalist approaches. They ultimatelyarrive at the view that a variationist/constructional approach best accounts forboth the semantic and morphosyntactic factors involved in grammaticalization. They emphasize that although grammaticalization is gradual, the micro-stepsinvolved in it are cognitively abrupt for speakers, meaning that whilegradualness is diachronic, gradience is synchronic. They conclude thatgrammaticalization is a constructional change that involves both form andmeaning and takes place through micro-changes across time, which may lead topolysemy. It cannot be reduced to either analogy or reanalysis, which are seenas related to grammaticalization but not as motivations for it. In the second article, ''Grammaticalization, the clausal hierarchy and semanticbleaching'', Ian Roberts approaches grammaticalization from a minimalistperspective, taking the traditional view that all lexemes are members of one andonly one grammatical category. In his analysis, gradience and gradualness arethe result of a fine-grained system of categorization with distinctions that areso small that they appear gradient. He commences his discussion by building onRoberts and Roussou's (2003) idea that grammaticalization always involves'upwards' movement to more abstract heads in a functional hierarchy. In thisview, reanalysis involves the suppression of movement, with an element thatformerly underwent movement being first-merged in a higher position. He adds tothis the concept of feature analysis, which allows for fine-grained categorydistinctions. He then relates the work of Roberts and Roussou (2003) toCinque's (1999) modal hierarchy; he notes that the concept of the 'upward' pathof movement in reanalysis corresponds to Cinque's hierarchy. He examinesstatistical data from a variety of languages that all show change from a lexicalcategory to a functional category or from a lower functional category to ahigher one in the hierarchy; in no case does he find a case of 'downward'reanalysis. Therefore, these approaches are highly compatible in that Robertsand Roussou (2003) establish the concept of 'upward' reanalysis, while Cinque(1999) allows for the possibility of explaining this reanalysis in terms ofsmall, discrete changes in category membership that give the appearance ofdiachronic gradualness and synchronic gradience. In this way, Roberts findsthat the minimalist approach to grammaticalization is compatible with thefunctionalist approach discussed in the previous article by Trousdale andTraugott, as these small changes correspond well to the micro-changes that theydescribe. He then goes on to discuss semantic bleaching and its relationship togrammaticalization. He arrives at the conclusion that the relationship ofsemantic bleaching to grammaticalization is unclear since it is explanatorilystrong with respect to some instances of grammaticalization but fails to explainothers.

The next article is ''Grammatical interference: Subject marker 'for' and thephrasal verb particles 'out' and 'forth'', by Hendrik de Smet. De Smet examinesthe ways in which grammatical elements that are undergoing grammaticalizationimpact on the grammaticalization of other elements due to analogical thinking. Using synchronic data drawn from a wide variety of English language corpora, heexamines the development of the subject marker 'for' in 'for…to-infinitiveconstructions', as well as the phrasal verb particles 'out' and 'forth'. In thecase of the subject marker 'for', which appears in structures such as 'for me tobe here', he finds that this element developed from a focus marker 'for', as in'for to help' and 'and now for something completely different', which isdifferent enough from the preposition 'for' based on both distribution andsemantics to consider the two to be homonyms. However, the preposition 'for'influenced the development of the subject marker 'for' in that the structure ofprepositional phrases with 'for' is mirrored by 'for…to-infinitive' structures,and because the two share certain distributional features. Similarly, phrasalverbs with 'out' and 'forth' are often interchangeable, as in 'stretchout/forth', although they are not interchangeable in all instances. Through anexamination of the historical development of these particles, the authorconcludes that the development of 'out' copied that of 'forth'. Based on thesestudies, de Smet concludes that grammaticalization is guided by connectionsbetween various grammaticalizing elements, as well as other elements of grammar;this occurs through analogical thinking and impacts structure, distribution, andeven persistence. From a constructionalist/connectionist stance, the authorstates that connections between these elements form the basis for gradience;grammatical elements intrude into each other's spaces on various grammatical andsemantic levels, leading to a lack of a one-to-one relationship betweendifferent levels of symbolic organization and the sharing of some features butnot others. Gradience therefore extends beyond morphology and syntax to involvesemantics and lexically determined distribution.

Following this is the article ''Category change in English with and withoutstructural change'' by David Denison. In this article, Denison examines wordclasses and category change in English. More specifically, he examinesinstances of gradience between lexical categories, along with category changeinvolving structural change, such as the use of 'on behalf of', which acts as apreposition as a unit while 'behalf' acts as a noun with a possessive marker. He also looks at the introduction of new categories, such as English modals anddeterminers, although he finds that category introduction is different from thepreviously mentioned linguistic changes. Based on these studies, he drawsseveral conclusions. First, he finds that since category change is a processthat occurs in steps, Aarts' (2004, 2007) differentiation between subsective andintersective gradience is unhelpful. He writes, ''the loss of prototypicalitywithin one category (subsective gradience) is not substantially different innature from the acquisition of an equal number of features of another category(intersective gradience) and then onwards to full membership of the new category(subsective gradience again)'' (113). He attributes gradience, as well as dualinheritance, to analogy, which is commonplace in human cognition and thereforeto be expected in human language. He also states that that semantics coercessyntax rather than the converse. Furthermore, he notes that in syntax-basedtheories, certain rigid assumptions, such as the separation of semantics andsyntax and membership of lexemes in one and only one category, may be useful butmay not be the most informative way to examine issues of gradience, gradualness,and grammaticalization. He supports the theory of Construction Grammar inmodelling grammaticalization, since it reduces underspecification, focuses onwhole constructions rather than individual parts, while not ignoring the partscompletely, and allows for dual or multiple inheritance.

Elly Van Gelderen's article 'Features in reanalysis and grammaticalization' islargely a critique of the previous articles by Roberts, De Smet, and Denison. She offers an alternative explanation of the data they discuss based on theFeature Economy Principle, in which language variation is determined by featurevariation, and it is assumed that it is more economical to merge features in ahigher position than to do so in a lower position and then move. In this view,change takes place in micro-shifts that occur in the course of child languageacquisition. She examines the data discussed by De Smet in terms of thesynchronic development of 'for', and states that the Feature Economy Principleaccounts for upward linguistic change, with feature loss and revaluation leadingchildren to reanalyze linguistic input. She points out that in some casesdifferent theories employ different definitions for the same terminology. Thiscan lead to radically different analyses; for example, the changes that Denisondiscusses as being non-structural are structural in her account. She believesthat a discussion of gradualness and directionality is unnecessary, writing ''Ithink we should stop worrying about whether change is gradual or not (it seemsto be agreed by most that it is) or directional or not'' (145).

In the article ''How synchronic gradience makes sense in the light of languagechange (and vice versa)'', Annette Rosenbach takes a diachronic approach tosynchronic gradience, examining it in terms of a mismatch of syntax andsemantics. She commences her discussion by re-examining Aarts' (2004, 2007)assumptions that there is a distinction between subsective and intersectivegradience and that category membership is determined by the application ofmorphosyntactic criteria. She argues that intersective gradience is common ifsemantic criteria are taken into account, and that a diachronic, corpus-basedexamination of this phenomenon enables one to see how gradience develops anddrives language change. To demonstrate this, she examines the development ofdeterminer genitives like 'the woman's blue eyes' and noun modifiers like 'theexpensive theatre ticket', and the gradience that exists between them; althoughthe determiner genitive is generally referential and animate, while the nounmodifier tends to be inanimate and non-referential, expressions such as 'thecheerful Obama supporters' show that this is not always the case. She concludesthat overlap between these constructions, which is relatively new in English,occurs due to a mismatch of the mapping of semantic features to constructiontype. Bridging constructions like s-less genitives and lexicalized expressions,along with the process of expansion/extension of noun modifiers and genitives,make this a possibility. Language change is a gradual process that occurs inmicro-steps and is based on analogy in which formal similarities result in thesharing of semantic features, which in turn reinforces the similarities. Shepoints out that this cannot really be classified as reanalysis, since reanalysisis generally defined in terms of formal change, while this change involvessemantic function; if semantics and morphosyntax are taken into account, theline between reanalysis and analogy is blurred. Finally, she looks briefly attypological data from a variety of languages, which indicates that a sharing ofsemantic features between genitives and noun modifiers is not limited to English.

In the following article, ''What can synchronic gradience tell us aboutreanalysis?: Verb-first conditionals in written German and Swedish'', MartinHilpert discusses various accounts of the evolution of verb-first conditionalstructures in German and Swedish; in these languages, constructions such as 'hadI known this, I would have stayed at home' are far less restricted than they arein English, with the Swedish construction being more grammaticalized than theGerman. Using corpus data, he compares a dialogue-based account with ananalogical account by describing and evaluating the predictions that each makes. The dialogual approach posits that verb-first conditionals developed fromdidactic question and answer interaction. The analogical approach, on the otherhand, posits that they developed through analogy from complex clause patternsthat exist in these languages. He compares these approaches through anexamination of text frequency, the frequency of linking elements, the use offirst-person subjects, counterfactual verb-first conditionals, the collocationaloverlap between conditionals and questions, and the displacement of thesubordinate clause (protasis). The first four of these are consistent with thepredictions of the dialogual approach, as is diachronic evidence, while thelatter two are not explained by it. He explores issues related to genre andmodality, as well as the analogical approach and an account involving twojuxtaposed declaratives as possible explanations for this. The author alsofinds that these structures developed gradually, and that reanalyzed structuresretain aspects of the source structure for a long time. He also finds thatsynchronic, cross-linguistic data is useful for the evaluation and comparison ofvarious theoretical approaches.

Lene Schøsler's article, ''A paradigmatic approach to language and languagechange'' looks at synchronic gradience and language change, as well as reanalysisand analogy, using construction paradigms and data from Danish and French. Sheargues that the use of paradigms should be expanded to describesyntactic/semantic phenomena. She discusses the development of the divalentdative in French, the introduction of the verb 'brainstorm' into Danish, and theuse of verbs for electronic communication, such as 'skyper' in French. Shefinds that paradigms, when viewed as 'packages' of content and expression, canbe extended to examine syntactic phenomena, with new verbs integrated intoexisting grammatical structures. According to Schøsler, the extension ofparadigms from morphology to syntax is useful because it allows for consistentanalysis of various parts of grammar, as well as the interface between differentparts of grammar. She argues that grammaticalized constructions can be viewedsynchronically as a succession of paradigms that have undergone numeroussmall-scale changes, and that this analysis facilitates the study of theemergence and modifications that new constructions undergo.

Following this is the article ''Grammaticalization and the it-cleftconstruction'', in which Amanda L. Patten examines development and extension inEnglish using a corpus-based constructional approach. First, she examinesnon-NP focus It-clefts, such as 'It's in December that she's coming'. She thengoes on to discuss 'Informative-Presupposition It-Clefts', in which the relativeclause contains new information, such as 'It was Cicero who once said, ''Laws aresilent at times of war.'''. She finds that non-prototypical It-clefts, such asnon-NP focus It-clefts and Informative-Presupposition It-Clefts emerged viacoercion through the extension of the existing It-cleft structure; thisstructure has undergone gradual, continual grammaticalization with increasedschematicity as a result of allowing a wider range of elements into the focalposition. Therefore, a diachronic examination of this structure using theconcept of grammaticalization aids in the understanding of its presentfunctional properties and distribution. As grammaticalization occurs,prototypical associations between semantic meaning, syntactic category, andpragmatic function are mismatched. The fact that NP-focus It-Clefts such as 'Itwas the therapist that killed her' emerged first and are still the most common,prototypical form of this construction, means that this construction exhibitsgradience, as do the categories of constructions that occur in the It-cleft. Thus, extension from prototypical to less prototypical versions of aconstruction over time leads to subsective constructional gradience, as well asintersective gradience at the elemental level as members of different categoriescome to share syntactic positions.

Walter Bisang's article, ''Grammaticalization in Chinese: A construction-basedaccount'' is the only article in the volume that focuses on a language that isnot Indo-European. Chinese is interesting in terms of grammaticalizationbecause Late Archaic Chinese is precategorial, meaning that lexical items areable to fill a variety of syntactic slots; this is less the case in modernChinese. In his paper, Bisang first outlines his approach to constructiongrammar with a focus on the concepts of scaffolding and coercion, in whichlexical items are slotted into syntactic structures, and syntactic structuresare able to coerce lexical items into particular functions. In the case of aprecategorial language, all lexemes can occur in all syntactic slots, and thisdistribution specifies or highlights the function of a given lexeme in a givenconstruction; in Late Archaic Chinese, for example, even proper nouns are ableto go in the syntactic V slot. Such flexibility means that one sentence mayhave numerous interpretations, and that the possibility of a lexical item beingreanalyzed and undergoing grammaticalization is increased because the number andtype of constructions in which it can appear is increased. This has resulted inthe development of structures such as the resultative, in which two verbs appeartogether with the second indicating the result of the action conveyed by thefirst; this did not occur in Late Archaic Chinese, but appears to have developeddue to the flexibility of its grammar. Based on this data, Bisang challengesthe assumption that words in all languages are members of one and only onelexical category, and that word class membership is independent of meaning. Furthermore, in terms of grammaticalization, Bisang shows that data fromlanguages like Chinese give an interesting insight because they show thatlexical items that are commonly used in one slot may be used in other slots aswell; when most or all lexemes can do this, it calls into question the divisionbetween subsective and intersective gradience.

In the last article, ''Grammaticalization and models of language'' Nigel Vincentand Kersti Börjars examine the role of theory in describing language change andfind that formal and functional approaches, rather than being mutuallyexclusive, are both useful in the study of this phenomenon. They evaluate thestrengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and point out that the assumptions,categories, and frameworks used by a given theory can change the outcome of astudy; for example, the categorical divisions that theoreticians in oneframework choose to employ may make grammaticalization appear gradual, while thedivisions in another theory make it appear abrupt. They compare the data andconclusions of numerous other articles in this volume with each other and withnew data to demonstrate this. They then discuss the benefits of formaltheoretical approaches that take advantage of functional data, and they describethe use of some of these approaches in detail. LFG and Stochastic OT have thebenefit of representing function and constituency independently, thus allowingthem to model both semantic and syntactic grammaticalization and to examine thelinks between them. Dynamic Syntax models language based on the perspective ofthe hearer/parser, which reverses the idea of grammaticalization as lexiconbecoming syntax; instead, syntax is seen as being incorporated into a lexicalentry. This allows for new ways of seeing grammaticalized structures. Furthermore, the authors discuss the application of formal semantics to thestudy of grammaticalization. They draw several conclusions based on their dataand the studies in this volume; first, they state that linguists must be willingto step beyond construction grammar and minimalism as opposing views, and theymust examine other theoretical approaches. They also emphasize that formalismand functionalism both have merit and are not mutually exclusive. Finally, theyfind that form and function do not necessarily change together, and they arguein favour of an approach that allows for their parallel study rather thanlinking them intrinsically as in minimalism and construction grammar.

EVALUATION

This volume is unique in that it examines the issues of gradience, gradualness,and grammaticalization from a cross-theoretical standpoint. In producing such avolume, the editors run the risk of it containing articles that are too attachedto a single theoretical viewpoint, and are therefore inaccessible to somereaders. However, in most cases this pitfall is avoided, and the majority ofthe articles are written in an accessible way that outlines theoreticalassumptions and avoids excessive jargon. A volume that contains articles basedin different theories not only enables the reader to weigh the benefits andlimitations of various theoretical approaches, but also to compare theconclusions of authors from other theoretical backgrounds with their own. Italso opens the reader up to new ways of examining data. As Vincent and Börjarspoint out, ''Different theoretical approaches lead one to look for explanationsin particular places, so that awareness of a plurality of approaches means abetter appreciation of potential explanations, however these are ultimatelymodelled'' (296).

However, the diversity of articles in this volume does present a weakness inthat the articles deal with a large range of data, make a variety of assumptionsthat may not be laid out for the reader, and sometimes use terminology that isdefined differently across theories. Many of the authors acknowledge this, andattempt to define their terminology adequately. However, due to spaceconstraints, and the fact that for many linguists who work solely in a singletheory, it is difficult to remember that not everyone makes the sameassumptions, in some articles terminology is not adequately defined andassumptions are made not only about theoretical basics but also about whatconstitutes common knowledge. The editors attempt to overcome this through theuse of the unifying questions summarized at the beginning of this review; inmany cases, this draws the articles together, although some authors do not referto the questions at all, and others refer to them only in passing.

A far more unifying feature of the book is that the authors have clearly readeach other's papers prior to publication, which has enabled them to comment onother approaches and present alternatives. This is evident in many of thearticles, and in some cases is a real strength to the book, as it gives animpression of a discourse between researchers from various backgrounds. Notonly does this clarify the issues presented in many of the articles, but it alsomakes the volume much more enjoyable to read, since in many instances it has thefeeling of a lively debate. The arrangement of the articles in the volumefacilitates this. For example, Rosenbach compares the use of features in herfunctional approach with Roberts' formalist approach and states her agreementwith de Smet on feature sharing and mismatch. Schøsler then refers toRosenbach's data on determiner genitives and builds on her approach to semanticfactors in gradience through the addition of new data. This culminates in thearticle by Vincent and Börjars, who compare formalism and functionalism andpoint out that although all the other articles in the book are either formal orfunctional, other theoretical alternatives to these approaches exist. In somecases, however, this backfires; for example, the majority of Van Gelderen'spaper critiques the articles of De Smet, Roberts, and Denison, while offeringvery little in the way of empirical evidence and novel theoretical discussion. This particular article reads more like a review of these authors than anarticle in its own right, and does little to add to the overall academiccontribution of the volume.

This volume would be significantly strengthened if it included data from agreater variety of languages. Roberts contains statistical data from severallanguages, but almost no linguistic data, van Gelderen contains a chart ofmacroparameters in various languages, and Rosenbach contains singleconstructions from Georgian and Hebrew. In terms of in-depth analysis, all ofthe authors but Bisang focus on Indo-European languages, with the vast majorityof data from Romance or Germanic languages. While data from these languages ismore accessible to English-speaking readers, any reader of this volume is likelyto be a fairly experienced linguist who would be able to cope with less familiarlinguistic structures. Bisang's excellent article demonstrates that data fromnon-IE languages is extremely informative and indeed necessary for thedevelopment of accurate typological theory and more broadly of linguistic theorythat adequately describes human language. Bisang's article discusses LateArchaic Chinese as a pre-categorial language; the inclusion of data from suchlanguages is extremely important for a discussion of linguistic categories ingeneral. This article shows precategoriality in an isolating language; however,the volume would benefit greatly from a discussion of this phenomenon inlanguages like those of the Salish or Wakashan families, or one of the manyother language families that exhibit precategoriality in a system with complexmorphology. Numerous linguists have discussed gradience in non-IE languages;certainly, therefore, sufficient synchronic and diachronic data exist to composean article with data from many of these languages. The inclusion of suchlanguages would make the conclusions drawn by the authors and editors of thevolume, and by the reader, better informed, more complete, and more reflectiveof human language as a whole.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Lindsay Morcom has recently completed a D.Phil in General Linguistics and
Comparative Philology from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses
on endangered and indigenous languages, especially those of Latin America
and Canada. She has performed fieldwork on the Pokomchi' language of
Guatemala, and has composed a grammar of this language in addition to
publications and presentations on Pokomchi' text analysis and metaphorical
systems. Her doctoral thesis is a comparative study of lexical categories
in Salish and Wakashan languages and Michif; it examines data from these
languages to explore gradience in parts of speech categories, and it
compares grammatical categories with conceptual categories using prototype
theory. She has also done research on coordination in Plains Cree. In
addition to this, she has a passion for teaching and enjoys working with
undergraduate students.